Nokia is setting up a third investment fund, putting $250m on the table for its VC business to invest in mobile-related ventures. It has also announced the appointment of a new MD and principal in its brand-new offices in China, where it is looking to expand operations.
Not that David Tang, the new Beijing-based managing …

Re: Entrepreneurs Beware! Do not trust Elop. @Eadon

Re: Entrepreneurs Beware! Do not trust Elop.

Yeah and Google won't steal your ideas?

Exhibit 1 - The iphone: Google had someone sat on the board at Apple while the iphone was being developed, they then wend out and purchased a blackberry-alike phone company and turned it into an iphone alike.

Shortly after this Google's guy on the board at Apple had to leave because of the rather obvious and massive conflict of interest.

Exhibit 2 - Youtube: Google purchased a company with no income stream and with serious questions as to the legality of large amounts of the content it hosted. They slapped ads over it, so they could profit and belatedly allowed media owners to say "err, actually that's mine".

Exhibit 3 - Android - Google, having purchased Android, released it into the market with clear issues as to the ownership of various technologies - Java (which they eventually won the court case) and also various MS technologies which they don't pay the license for, instead they expect the handset manufacturers to.

Re: Entrepreneurs Beware! Do not trust Elop.

How did MS screw Danger? According to wikipedia the brought them into MS and kept them working on mobile technologies, albeit after ceasing development of sidekick/kin.

Again, looked at from a dispassionate position, Sendo looks like a massive balls up on both sides - Remember that Sendo was actually Philips and Motorola, not some little cottage industry. There appears to have been a delay in delivery of code from MS and Sendo went to Symbian, which looks like a clear breach of contract.

I'm not saying for a minute that MS haven't had a bit of a dodgy past in some areas, but these don't seem to be brilliant examples.

Re: Entrepreneurs Beware! Do not trust Elop.

@AC 16:36 GMT:

Exhibit 3:

It is quite clear before AND after the court case as to who owns Java. As for the MS technologies that Google doesn't license but requires the handset manufacturer. Google is GIVING Android away aren't they? Next, many times the terms of a license dictate that it is not transferable. Other times, the license would be a lot more expensive for a transferable one. So it makes more economic sense for the manufacturers to license the technology from Microsoft. You don't think that Samsung doesn't already have a license? They sell more than just Android handsets.

@AC 16:46 GMT:

"How did MS screw Danger? According to wikipedia the brought them into MS and kept them working on mobile technologies, albeit after ceasing development of sidekick/kin."

You stated it yourself how MS screwed Danger; the Kin. How quickly did MS scrap that? WP7 was marginally more successful than the Kin was. Look at MS did to the customers of the Sidekick. They lost how much of the customers data? When MS screwed the customers, they screwed Danger as well.

Sendo was not Philips and Motorola, just people from them. MS bought ownership in the company (10%) and MS was to deliver code by June; December rolled around and all of the code was still not available. So, what was Sendo suppose to do? MS didn't deliver on what they promised. Then MS tried to use what Sendo learned to sell to others. Ever think that MS used that clause to do just that from the start? Have Sendo do the work and MS gets to use, all it cost them was that 10% which ran them $12m. They paid pennies on the dollar for development costs.

Re: Entrepreneurs Beware! Do not trust Elop.

You are unclear about what you mean when you say 'Java', perhaps you are unaware of the distinctions that should be made.

The Java language is freely usable by anyone.

Oracle owns the Sun JVMs, Sun SDKs, and Sun's Java documentation. For some of these, licences are freely available, for others, such as Java ME, Oracle want a licence fee.

Other companies are free to build their own Java development systems, under certain conditions they can call these Java, otherwise they have to use a different name, such as Dalvik. many other implementations of Java exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

What Oracle claimed was: copyright on a dozen or so lines of code, which they didn't even write; and on the structure and organization of the API, which was ruled unprotectable. In any case if Google did copy, it was from Apache which is perfectly legitimate - the licence specifically allows this.

> and also various MS technologies which they don't pay the license for, instead they expect the handset manufacturers to.

The argument is that there are no 'MS technologies' in Android. MS won't say what they are, just threatening litigation over their unstated claims. When they threatened B&H the so called patents were revealed: